Selections fromA Defence of Poetry

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

An observation of the regular mode of the occurrence of this
harmony, in the language of poetical minds, together with its
relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of
traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means
essential that a poet should accomodate his language to this
traditional form, so that the harmony which is its spirit, be
observed. The practise is indeed convenient and popular and to be
preferred, especially in such composition as includes much
action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the
example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his
peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and
prose-writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between
philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was
essentially a poet — the truth and splendour of his imagery
and the melody of his language is the most intense that it is
possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic,
dramatic and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony
in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forebore to
invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include under
determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought
to imitate the cadence of his periods but with little success.
Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and majestic
rhythm which satisfies the sense no less than the almost
superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it
is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of
the readers' mind and pours itself forth together with it into
the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy.
— All the Authors of revolutions in opinion are not only
necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words
unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which
participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are
harmonious and rhythmical and contain in themselves the elements
of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those
supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on
account of the form and action of their subjects, less incapable
of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
have omitted that form. Shakespear, Dante and Milton (to confine
ourselves to modern writers.) are philosophers of the very
loftiest powers.

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama
sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of
the form of the great master-pieces of antiquity, divested of all
harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very
form misunderstood: or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines,
which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually
no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness
with which the author in common with his auditors are infected.
Hence what has been called the classical and the domestic drama.
Addison's Cato is a specimen of the one, and would it were not
superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes
Poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning
ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain
it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature
are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and
passion: which divested of imagination are other names for
caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the
greatest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II when
all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed
become hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and
virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him.
At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms
of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon
them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to
humour; we laugh from self complacency and triumph instead of
pleasure; malignity, sarcasm & contempt succeeds to
sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity,
which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life,
becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less
disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of society
for ever brings forth new food; which it devours in secret.

The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown
over the stream of time which unites the modern and the antient
world. The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and
his rival Milton have idealised, are merely the mask and the
mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped
and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far
they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted
in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people.
Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by
placing Riphæus whom Virgil calls justissimus unus in
Paradise, and observing a most heretical caprice in his
distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem
contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system
of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a
chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and
magnificence of the character as expressed in Paradise Lost. It
is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for
the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient
cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the
extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and
although venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant;
although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one
subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the
victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his
God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived
to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who
in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most
horrible revenge upon his enemy — not from any mistaken
notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but
with the alledged design of exasperating him to deserve new
torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this
shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alledged no
superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this
bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof
of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He mingled as it were the
elements of human nature, as colours upon a single pallet, and
arranged them into the composition of his great picture according
to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that
principle by which a series of actions of the external universe,
and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the
sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The Divina
Comedia, and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a
systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one
more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and
decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed
in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly
forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of
genius.